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A cartoon roundup

Two films not worth getting animated about
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By Steffen Silvis
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
November 28th, 2007 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Mother-slayer of the peat bogs. Cartoons of Ray Winstone and a voluptuous Angelina Jolie (in flesh heels) meet.

Beowulf
Directed by Robert Zemeckis
With Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn, John Malkovich, Brendan Gleeson, Crispin Glover and Angelina Jolie

Halloween
Directed by Rob Zombie
With Malcolm McDowell, Sheri Moon Zombie, Tyler Mane, Brad Dourif, Daeg Faerch and William Forsythe

Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf is the newest exercise in motion-capture animated filmmaking, though in its striving for “reality” it comes off as less of an achievement than Christian Volckman’s moody, dystopic noir Renaissance of last year.
I say that having only seen the film in a regular 2-D 35mm print. When properly shown in 3-D, it’s likely this re-rendering of the Anglo-Saxon epic has more punch. That said, I still cannot see how the film can be anything other than gimmick, one that will eventually be ranked somewhere just above Dr. Tongue’s 3-D House of Pancakes.
Without the aid of 3-D projection or ancient, ill-fitting cardboard glasses, it’s difficult to know whether the characters’ eyes will still make them appear stone blind or if the heroes’ horses will look like more than tricked-out Shetland ponies. Even with access to 3-D, Zemeckis’ sharpest bits of motion capturing are blatantly reserved for the film’s stars, while his extras look like nothing more than escapees from Shrek.
This technical traipse back to the old mead hall is further burdened with a poor script, surprisingly concocted by Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary, both good writers. While their new takes on the tale are always clever (the Danish king Hrothgar is actually Grendel’s father; Beowulf does not kill but beds Grendel’s mother), the dialogue is risible.
While the women speak as if pulled from a well-thumbed Mills and Boons’ bodice-lacer, the men are reduced to virile shouts and drunken raillery. Spare a thought for the excellent Ray Winstone (Beowulf), who is forced to give breath to such drivel as “I am the teeth of darkness, the talons in the night. Mine is strength and lust, and power. I am Beowulf!” One almost expects to hear “Spartans!” bellowed in reply just off. Still, it’s a nice touch to have Grendel (Crispin Glover) speaking a cod Anglo-Saxon, as well as the odd scop kenning away in the old mother tongue.
The fine cast members (Anthony Hopkins, Robin Wright Penn, etc.) have mostly had their bodies re-imagined, a startling technological advance that promises much for the future of porn. Angelina Jolie, in particular, as Grendel’s mother, becomes a Circe of the peat bogs, a voluptuous cartoon of nudity to thrill teens young and old.
Technical toys are all fine and well, but it would be interesting to see a bit more substance to give 3-D depth to.
Rob Zombie’s remake of John Carpenter’s classic Halloween is both live-action cartoon and needless remake, though it possesses far more skill than that dire remake of Carpenter’s The Fog two years ago.
Zombie’s screamplay is more or less Carpenter’s, though the younger director has decided to provide a back story for the murderous and masked Michael Myers, in an attempt to provide some psychological rational for his knife and bat sprees.
This addition, that is to say, Zombie’s own original touch to the tale, is the only entertaining part of the film. Young Michael (the half-feral looking Daeg Faerch) is trapped in his stripper mother’s house with her loutish boyfriend and Michael’s two sisters. What solace he finds from the fights downstairs and the taunts he endures at school is found in butchering small mammals.
On a fateful Halloween night in the town of Haddonfield, in the shabbily dressed side of the ’70s, Michael will don a mask, and his destiny as a full-fledged psychopath will be realized.
Though the family is played like white-trash Flintstones, Zombie still manages to brilliantly tap into that stoned, uncombed era, aided by snatches of Rush and Blue Oyster Cult playing in the background. The menacing vacantness of Faerch is part of the first part’s strength, as is the performance of Zombie’s wife, Sheri Moon, as the mother of this modern-day Grendel.
The rest of the film falls into slasher clichés, complete with the strange sado-Puritanism that can be found in Carpenter’s original, where, like some desolation angel of God in full moon regalia, Mikey focuses his wrath on over-sexed teens (perhaps the perfect addition to the American conservatives’ school abstinence program).
Carpenter, of course, is the father of the teen slasher genre. Perhaps his spawn should now be given a proper Protestant burial with this middling homage.

Steffen Silvis can be reached at ssilvis@praguepost.com


Other articles in Night & Day (28/11/2007):

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